Observatory overlooking a bat colony under one of the bridges in Houston’s Herman Park.
Awarded the 2019 Sundin Scholarship
- Funded by the Sundin family through the University of Houston College of Architecture
This project was a design proposal for an observatory overlooking a bat colony under one of the bridges in Houston’s Herman Park. Due to the qualities of the site and its respective limitations, my take on the bat observatory leaned towards a more organic solution since a very early stage of development. I chose the circular display to maximize my opportunities when framing views and to more lightly place the building on the site by creating a relationship with the trees that surround it. Later on, I started to imagine that inhabiting this space should feel like inhabiting a tree canopy, or a converging cluster of them, so I separated the core and the secondary programs into their own individual “trunks” and waffled the structure to scatter light more like a tree canopy would. This way the building transcended its primary function and became its own micro environment.